photography projects for kids

have a scavenger hunt – find things that are blue, things that start with the letter G, things with wheels, you get the idea

take pictures and create a photo book (similar to a scavenger hunt but with a book product)– for example take photos for a counting book, a book about colours or take photos of groups of objects and create an “I Spy” book

have your child document a day in their life

take photos during a special outing and write a story to accompany the pictures, at the end of this post you can see the story my son and I created after visiting a local wildlife park.

have your child take photos of the same subject using a variety of different angles

take photos of the members of your family to create a family tree

You can also create some amazing products with photos taken by your child. Here are some ideas …

print the photos and make albums or photobooks

frame their best photos

email photos to family and friends or post them on a blog (for example, my son and I wrote about our visit to a wildlife park and emailed it to our family – you can see the story below)

photo printing services can put a photo on a t-shirt, or a bag, a cup, a keyring, just about anything really

print a photograph (for the best results at a large size)and cut it up to create a photo puzzle. For more fun, you could use these instructions from Photojojo to create a photo puzzle to be sent piece by piece through the mail and put together at the other end.

7 comments:

Great post, Catherine! When my son first got his camera, we created a Nature ABC book. I'd forgotten how much fun that was. Now that he's a little older, I'd love to encourage him to create a story, too. Thanks for the great suggestions!

I really enjoyed this post. I went down this path with my toddler accidentally. We visited a wildlife park and he wanted a camera so we bought him a disposable one in the gift shop. The pictures were hysterical, he had a ball and now it's a "thing" in our family. The great thing about the throw-away cameras is no one gets too upset when they're dropped, even when they plop in the lake which happened to us once.

Solid ideas! I love the scavenger hunt and photo on a T-shirt. Our son is older now, but we got him started with a camera at an early age, and he still goes on photo shoots. It's an excellent activity for little ones to keep them thinking creatively about their surroundings.

Great ideas! I'll be using some of these with my oldest. He's four and has been using our camera for the past year . . . he takes excellent photos! He's gotten quite a few good ones of the rest of us, as well as some of his favorite things.

I find it fascinating to see what kids focus on with their photos. My son is really into textures and does closeups of all kinds of things, like the sofa, a rusty pipe, etc.